Abandoned Cart Recovery for OpenCart 2.3, 3.x and 4.x

Abandoned Cart Recovery for OpenCart is a module that tracks carts left behind before checkout and brings the customer back with a reminder email containing a personal link. One click and every item is back in the cart. Carts belonging to logged-in customers are recorded straight away; guest carts only once the customer has entered an e-mail address at checkout. Separate builds for OpenCart 2.3, 3.x and 4.x.

What the admin gets

A dedicated “Abandoned Carts” screen in the OpenCart admin: four statistics tiles — abandoned carts, recovered carts, recovered revenue and recovery rate — plus a cart table with a status filter. You can see the customer’s e-mail, cart contents, total, time abandoned, and whether it’s a registered customer or a guest.

The settings page is split into tabs: “General” (the delay after which a cart counts as abandoned, how long the recovery link stays valid, the anti-spam pause between emails to the same address, the data retention period, a ready-made cron URL), “Reminders” (subject and body of each email), “Coupon”, “Telegram” and “License”.

Viber or SMS reminder

Many shoppers leave only a phone number at checkout and never type an e-mail. With Pro (OpenCart 4.x build) those carts come back too: after the delay you set, the shopper gets one short Viber message with a link to the saved cart, and an SMS if the number has no Viber or the message is not delivered. Messages go out through your own TurboSMS account, so you pay your own rate.

The module writes once per cart and never at night: quiet hours are a setting, and a message that falls into them goes out in the morning. The Viber/SMS link is separate from the e-mail link, so one never cancels the other. Before going live you can check the balance and send yourself a test message right from the admin panel.

How it works, step by step

1. The customer builds a cart. Logged-in customers are recorded straight away; guests as soon as they enter an e-mail address at checkout. Nothing is written to the database before that.
2. After a set period of inactivity (60 minutes by default) a background scan marks the cart as abandoned.
3. A reminder email is sent with a personal link. The subject and body are editable, with placeholders available: {customer_name}, {cart_items}, {recovery_link}, {store_name}.
4. Clicking the link restores the cart — the items return, and the customer carries on from where they left off. Once an order appears for that address, the cart automatically moves to recovered.
5. With Pro: instead of one email, a chain of up to three is sent — each with its own delay, subject and body — and from a chosen email onward a personal discount coupon is added automatically. The store owner gets a Telegram notification for every abandoned cart.

Installation

OpenCart 4.x

1. Admin → Extensions → Installer → upload abandoned_cart.ocmod.zip.
2. Admin → Extensions → Extensions → Modules → find “Abandoned Cart Recovery” and click the green “+” (this creates the module’s table, registers the events and grants permissions).
3. Click the pencil icon, enable the module and save. Right after upload, before clicking “+”, the route replies “Permission denied” — that’s normal OpenCart 4 behaviour.

OpenCart 2.3

1. The stock OpenCart 2.3 installer copies files over FTP only, so unpack abandoned-cart-oc2.ocmod.zip and upload the contents of its upload/ folder to the store root (FTP/SFTP or the hosting file manager).
2. Admin → Extensions → Modules → find the module, click “+”, then “Edit”: enable it, save, and point a system cron at the URL shown on the General tab.

OpenCart 3.x

1. Admin → Extensions → Installer → upload abandoned-cart-oc3.ocmod.zip.
2. Admin → Extensions → Modifications → click “Refresh”.
3. Admin → Extensions → Modules → find the module, click “+”, then “Edit”: enable and save.

Cron

The installer adds two entries under System → Maintenance → Cron Tasks: abandoned_cart_scan (hourly — marks abandoned carts and sends emails) and abandoned_cart_cleanup (daily — closes expired carts and clears old data).

OpenCart’s own cron only fires when someone visits the storefront, and its shortest cycle is one hour. For emails to go out on a tighter schedule, point a system cron at the scan URL (shown on the module’s settings page), for example every 15 minutes:

*/15 * * * * curl -s "https://example.com/index.php?route=extension/abandoned_cart/cron.scan" >/dev/null

For OpenCart 3.x the route is different — extension/module/abandoned_cart_cron/scan; the ready-made URL is likewise filled in on the settings page. OpenCart 2.3 has no scheduler at all, so there a system cron on the same route is required.

Under the hood

• Nothing extra is collected — no personal data is stored from anonymous browsing. A guest cart is only recorded once the customer has entered an e-mail address at checkout.
• The recovery link is safe to email — only a SHA-256 hash of the token is stored in the database, never the token itself; the link is single-use and time-limited.
• Recovery is detected automatically — once an order appears against the e-mail or customer ID, that customer’s open carts switch to “recovered” and count toward recovered revenue.
• Pro coupons are genuine OpenCart coupons, not a text placeholder: a one-time row in the coupon table, with its own expiry date, as a percentage or a fixed amount.
• Secrets are encrypted — the Telegram bot token is stored encrypted; if the store moves to a different folder or database, the module warns you and asks you to re-enter it.
• Only three outside calls: catcode.com.ua to check the license key, api.telegram.org only if Telegram notifications are on, and api.turbosms.ua only if Viber/SMS reminders are on.